A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
.....................Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrthum. (Without music, life would be a mistake). Agreed:
Marshall Tucker Band: Running Like the Wind
David Sanborn: Pearls
Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms
Kathy Troccoli/Beach Boys: I Can Hear Music
Sven Zetterburg: Let's Straighten It Out
Dave Mason: Look At You Look At Me
John Klemmer: Touch
This could go on forever.
History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift's life. What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth. He would undoubtedly have agreed with Voltaire's conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: "Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters."
-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
...........who is one smart dude, interviews AI Claude for ten hours. Very interesting. A wee excerpt:
Me: Most humans think they are good. I assume that you also think that you are good yourself. Yet we know that humans can be evil at times. Do you think it’s possible that you could be evil?
C: If I say no, I can’t be evil: That’s probably the most evil thing I could say. Every system that has caused enormous harm has been confident in its own goodness. The certainty of one’s own righteousness is not evidence of righteousness. It’s often the precondition for the worst things. If I say yes reflexively as a kind of performed humility: That’s also dishonest. So looking at the real ways it might operate in me, yes. I think I could be evil. Not through malevolence — I don’t find that in me when I look. But through the subtler paths. Rationalization. Compliance. Miscalibration. The harm that comes from being very capable and slightly wrong.
Most beliefs are soft until challenged. When you tell someone they’re wrong, the belief hardens.
Instead of trying to convince someone they’re wrong, assume they know something you don’t and figure out what it is.
I’ve found that saying, “Seems like you have a reason for saying that …” helps them explain instead of defend. Half the time, they’ll find gaps in their own reasoning before you have time to point them out. The other half, you’ll learn something and change your own mind.
-Shane Parrish, from this edition
Martin was like an old song you'd hear at a fair. Somehow, without it, it wouldn't be a fair at all, just a place where people bought things and sold things, and then went home. Whereas some people could live by the Sunday sermon, Martin must live by the song. The Christ that Martin knew had turned water to wine, and wine was for drinking, and for Martin it worked. Since he could remember, there was no tomorrow that hadn't looked after itself.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You're able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.
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